An Old Sermon with New Meaning

New Years is a time when people make New Years resolutions. “This year, I’m going to hold my temper in check. This year I’m not going to eat so much. This year I’m going to quit smoking.”

There’s something about a brand new year; a brand new calendar full of blank dates, that makes us think that we can start over fresh. It’s like this all over the world.

The Korean people have an interesting tradition. You’ve heard the expression “Go fly a kite?” Well on New Years Day in Korea, that’s exactly what they do. They go fly a kite. Everybody decides what bad habits he wants to get rid of, or what past deeds he wants forgiven in the New Year. Then he writes these things on his kite and flies it high in the air. When the kite is so high that it is almost out of sight, he cuts the string. The kite disappears, symbolically taking with it all those bad things, leaving him with a clean slate for the New Year.

Or how about New Years in Italy? As midnight approaches on New Years Eve, the streets get deserted. There’s no traffic, no pedestrians. Even the policemen take cover. Then, at the stroke of 12, the windows of the houses fly open. With a great clatter and crash, each family member pitches out old dishes, ornaments, unwanted furniture, and a whole catalog of personal possessions - anything which remind them of something bad about the old year that they want to forget in the new. That’s how the Italians clean house!

Would that it were so easy! If only we could overcome our past, our failures, our weaknesses, and our bad habits by simply throwing them out the window or letting them fly away!

Alexander the Great was one of the few men in history who deserved his title. He was energetic, versatile, and intelligent. He was a man of action. He never encountered an enemy that he could not defeat, until he looked in the mirror. There was an enemy within himself that he could never quite conquer. It was his temper.

On one occasion, a childhood friend of Alexander, a general in his army, became drunk. The man began to joke and ridicule the Emperor. Blinded by anger, quick as a flash, Alexander grabbed a spear from a nearby soldier and hurled it at his friend. He intended only to scare him, but the spear struck his friend and fatally wounded him. He died moments later in Alexander’s arms.

Alexander was overcome with remorse. He fell into a depression. He even tried to take his own life with the same spear, but his men stopped him. For days he lay on his bed in despair. When his friends came to comfort him, he confessed to them over and over his own stupidity and criminal murder.

Alexander the Great subdued mighty cities and entire countries. He defeated great rulers and kings. He conquered the world, but he was unable to conquer himself. Within his own soul was a kingdom that resisted him to the end. And in that way, Alexander the Great is just like you and me.

There’s only one person who can conquer the kingdom of self, and that is the great king from heaven, Jesus Christ. When Jesus came, He came to set up his own kingdom here on earth. When he walked out of the Judean wilderness and into the towns and cities of Israel, he had one message: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of God is here.”

Now when we think of a kingdom, we think of geography. We think of political borders, of boundary lines drawn on a map. But Jesus did not come to set up a kingdom like that. His kingdom is far greater than something that could be encompassed by territorial borders. He came to set up his kingdom on this planet in the hearts of men. He came to bring the people of all nations back under his rulership, under his sovereignty. He came to liberate us from slavery and bondage to the evil one, and give us life and freedom. That’s what his kingdom is all about.

If we are followers of Jesus, then we are citizens of that kingdom. It doesn’t matter what nationality we are. It doesn’t matter where we live. Our allegiance is to King Jesus and we are his subjects.

In the Gospel of Matthew chapters 5-7, Jesus gives us a concentrated description of what it means to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. He tells us in those chapters how you become a citizen. He tells us what difference it is going to make in how we live. He tells us how being a citizen of his kingdom it is going to affect our attitudes, our outlook, our relationships, and our priorities. He tells us that being a citizen of the kingdom of heaven is going to make a total and radical change in our lives - a change for the better. He tells us that being a citizen of his kingdom is going to give us victory over the kingdom of self. That’s something that we’ve been utterly unable to achieve in spite of all our best intentions and all our New Years resolutions.

All these truths are contained in a passage that we call the Sermon on the Mount. We are going to examine it verse by verse, going through those three chapters on Sunday mornings for the next several months. I believe that the Lord has some extremely important lessons to teach us from this part of His Word in 1991. There are truths here that we desperately need to hear because we live in a culture that is going in the total opposite direction of the kingdom of heaven. If we are going to impact that culture and the people of that culture as citizens of God’s kingdom, we’re going to have to pay close attention to what Jesus is saying to us here.

In fact, I feel so strongly about this that I would like to give you a little project to do. You didn’t expect to get homework in church, did you! I would encourage you to take some time this week to sit down and read through the Sermon on the Mount - Matthew 5 - 7. Read it all the way through at one sitting. It will take you no more than about 10 - 15 minutes. Then, when you are through, read it again.

I would challenge you to read through the Sermon on the Mount once a week every week this year. I believe that if you do that, the Word of God will change your life. What Jesus says in this sermon is so powerful that if you expose yourself to its truth, if you allow it to really get into your mind and your heart, if you saturate your life with it, you will never be the same again.

The Sermon on the Mount was not just one sermon preached on one occasion by Jesus. The sermon on the mount contains the essence of all of Jesus’ teaching to his disciples in the three and a half years of his public ministry. Many of the things that Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount he says again in other places and in other contexts throughout his ministry. Over in the Gospel of Luke, in chapter 6, there is a place where Jesus says many of these things again. Only there, he isn’t on a mountain, he is on a level place. We call this one the Sermon on the Mount, and that one the Sermon on the Plain, but Jesus is teaching the same truth in both sermons.

Look at what it says in Matthew 5:1-2. This is how Matthew introduces the sermon.

Matthew 5:1-2 Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them, saying…

The first thing we read there is that Jesus saw the crowds. Over and over again in Jesus’ ministry, we read that he saw the crowds and had compassion for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd. One time, as he looked at the city of Jerusalem, the very center of the nation Israel, Jesus said…

Matthew 23:37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.

Don’t ever think that you are insignificant. Don’t ever be tempted to think that God doesn’t notice you. Jesus Christ sees you. And He cares about you.

Now the next thing we read in Matthew’s introduction to the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus went up on a mountainside. We don’t know exactly where this mountain was, other than it was somewhere in Galilee. The fact that it isn’t even named indicates that it probably wasn’t a major mountain, but more like a hill somewhere. Galilee is full of hills.

But it is significant that it was on a mountain. In the Bible, God offers man two ways to get to heaven. They aren’t in conflict with each other, they are simply two routes to the same goal. One of them is the Law. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. He said if you keep the Law that I’m giving you, you’ll make it. You’ll be perfectly righteous, and I will welcome you into heaven. Quite simple.

The only problem is that nobody can keep the Law. No matter how hard you try, sooner or later, you break one of the commandments. And when you break one, you might just as well have broken them all, because you are no longer perfectly righteous. And it takes a perfectly righteous person to make it to heaven. God gave us the Law to show us that we could not, by our own efforts, make it to heaven. How tragic that people try, by keeping the Law, to justify themselves in God’s sight! God Himself told us that it could not be done.

That is why God designed another way, which is in fact, the only way. The way of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If we’re going to get to heaven, and we can’t get there by ourselves, then God is going to have to get us there. And He did, by sending Jesus Christ to die for our sins. When Christ died on the cross, a great exchange took place. God placed our sins on His Son, and He placed the perfect righteousness of His Son on all who believe in Him. That’s how we qualify for heaven. We have a perfect righteousness that we haven’t earned, it has been imputed to us - it has been credited to our account - by God.

That is how we become a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. We believe that since we ourselves have nothing to offer to the process of our salvation, God has done it for us in the person of Jesus Christ. And that message is what the Sermon on the Mount is all about. The Sermon on the Mount is not about Law, it is about Grace.

So you have two mountains, one in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament. Moses up on Mount Sinai received the Law - the message of condemnation. Jesus, on this nameless mountain in Galilee, gave us the message of Grace.

Now the next thing that we notice is that Jesus sat down. That was the official teaching position of a Rabbi in those days. Although we have gotten away from this custom, we still speak of a professor having a chair on the faculty of a university. Jesus spoke with authority. In fact, when he was finished, Matthew tells us that

…the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.

The teachers of the law in ancient Israel used to debate and argue over the most trivial points. When someone would go to them for answers, they would cite this rabbi and that rabbi and tell the person that there were a whole range of opinions on that particular question. That was the best they could do. They only spoke with the authority of men.

Have you ever noticed that the experts really don’t know much? Take our economy for example. You poll ten different economists on the question of when this recession will end, and you’ll get ten different answers. You ask an expert meteorologist what the weather will be on February 1st and he won’t even begin to know that answer. You ask a psychologist why people do the things they do, and he will advance several possible theories. That is the kind of teaching that we are used to. Teaching without authority. But that is not the kind of teaching we get in the Sermon on the Mount.

Listen to what James T. Fisher, says about the Sermon on the Mount in his book “The Case Book of a Psychiatrist”.

If you were to take the sum total of all the authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene - if you were to combine them and refine them and cut out the excess verbiage - if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would end up with an awkward and incomplete shadow of the Sermon on the Mount.

When Jesus sat down to teach, the lesson was worth listening to! He taught with authority.

But who did he teach? He taught his disciples. That is interesting. He saw the crowds, but he taught his disciples. The word disciple means a learner. In those days, when a man wanted to study under a rabbi, he would go to that rabbi and ask him for the privilege of becoming one of his disciples. If the rabbi accepted him, he would go and live with the rabbi. He would pay for his tuition by performing menial tasks in the household. He would become the servant of the rabbi. Education for a disciple was more than a commitment of his mind, it was a commitment of his life.

The crowd acknowledged Jesus as a great teacher. They were amazed by his miracles, and they followed him around the countryside, hoping that he would do something for them. But Jesus didn’t entrust the truth about His kingdom to the crowd, he gave it to his disciples. He said “If you want to learn from me, you need to take my yoke upon you.” He said “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

The same is true today. If you really want to know what the Sermon on the Mount is all about, you’d better be prepared to be a disciple. God is not in the business of giving out truth in the hope that once you’ve received it, you’ll follow him. No, He says “Follow me, and then I’ll give you the truth.”

Being a disciple of Jesus Christ is much, much more than simply committing your mind or your intellect to Him. It is a matter of committing your whole life to Him. That’s the entrance fee. He’s not interested in anything less from you. Because he cannot make you into a citizen of his kingdom unless he has all of you.